The Oxford Book of English Verse

Product Information

Care has been taken with the texts. But I have sometimes thought it consistent with the aim of the book to prefer the more beautiful to the better attested reading. I have often excised weak or superfluous stanzas when sure that excision would improve; and have not hesitated to extract a few stanzas from a long ​poem when persuaded that they could stand alone as a lyric. The apology for such experiments can only lie in their success: but the risk is one which, in my judgement, the anthologist ought to take. A few small corrections have been made, but only when they were quite obvious. FOR this Anthology I have tried to range over the whole field of English Verse from the beginning, or from the Thirteenth Century to this closing year of the Nineteenth, and to choose the best. Nor have I sought in these Islands only, but wheresoever the Muse has followed the tongue which among living tongues she most delights to honour. To bring home and render so great a spoil compendiously has been my capital difficulty. It is for the reader to judge if I have so managed it as to serve those who already love poetry and to implant that love in some young minds not yet initiated.

The book does have its points. Scottish poetry, traditionally a poor cousin, has been given something like its proper prominence. The selections from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, whether or not they theoretically belong there, sure sound good. Matthew Arnold's "The Scholar-Gipsy", that bane of generations of sophomores with term papers due, has been reduced to a handful of stanzas which usefully demonstrate how bad a poem it really is. But taken as a whole, we find in this book that the anthologist's mission of portraying the sweep and blood of poetic tradition has been sacrificed to the department head's need not to hurt the feelings of anyone at the faculty meeting. It's not that the poems chosen are not worthwhile (though I for one could have done without Anthony Thwaite's tiresome poetry establishment in-joke of a poem consisting of all the names from Contemporary Poets, or Swinburne's really disgusting ode to foot fetishism and necrophilia, "The Leper"), it is that the necessity of satisfying all scholarly claimants leaves insufficient room for the poets and poems who really count. To the President and Fellows and Scholars of Trinity College Oxford / a house of learning; ancient, liberal, humane, and my most kindly nurse" Consider Donne, who in Q's selection and contexting seems a metaphysical curiosity, a poet who developed an eccentric, albeit interesting, version of Elizabethan lyric. G's Donne is revealed as one of the most vibrantly alive human beings who ever lived. But it is after Keats, the section of Q's book which as G remarks with diplomatic mildness "had always given least satisfaction," where G has done what Q should have done in 1939. Most of the clunky Victorian poetic furniture has been hauled off to the Sally Ann (though G could not steel herself to throw out dear old "they told me, Heraclitus ...", and that great enforcer of yawns Matthew Arnold is still droning on about his carefree Oxford days), and the nervous splendors of twentieth century verse are intelligently grafted onto tradition according to a program which clearly and properly divides them into the build-up to "The Waste Land", "The Waste Land", and the aftermath of "The Waste Land."Lord Tennyson (from Works of Alfred Tennyson) the author's representative; Messrs. Macmillan Co., Ltd , The Macmillan Co., New York. Rudyard Kipling (from Rewards and Fairies): Mrs. Kipling; Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd.; Messrs. Doubleday Doran & Co.; The Macmillan Co. of Canada, Ltd. From Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1919 Introduction to this extensive collection: “For this Anthology I have tried to range over the whole field of English Verse…. To bring home and render so great a spoil compendiously has been my capital difficulty. It is for the reader to judge if I have so managed it as to serve those who already love poetry and to implant that love in some young minds not yet initiated.”

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. urn:lcp:oxfordbookofengl00chri:epub:63ccefcc-1027-479a-a185-c55cc8b4628f Extramarc Columbia University Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier oxfordbookofengl00chri Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t35183h0h Invoice 1213 Isbn 0192141821 Lccn 99020831 Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_module_version 0.0.5 Ocr_parameters -l eng Openlibrary_edition I know books like these rarely have notes etc but still. It's hard for a poetry newbie to get into some of this stuff. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2013-10-14 16:04:17.622563 Bookplateleaf 0006 Boxid IA1156408 Boxid_2 CH121024 City Oxford [u.a.] DonorA. E. Housman (from Last Poems and A Shropshire Lad): the literary executors, Messrs. Henry Holt, Inc., New York. TO THE PRESIDENT, FELLOWS AND SCHOLARS OF TRINITY COLLEGE OXFORD: A HOUSE OF LEARNING ANCIENT, LIBERAL HUMANE AND MY MOST KINDLY NURSE There are no meaningful notes on meaning or context and for many poems there's no comment on source. Poems aren't ever given a year of composition which makes context even harder to discern sometimes. Taking a poet a day, I rediscovered a few poets I've always liked (Yeats, Blake), and found a few new favorites I hadn't much read before (Auden, Dryden, Tennyson). That's where this kind of anthology fishing expedition can be really handy. I'll be exploring further. Still, a lot of it is that kind of "Alas, fair Xanthrope, when I gaze into thy azure orbs, thou casteth me nigh unto Methushaleph's lorbs" stuff that temps me to dislike poetry. And yet the advantages of G's critical perspective have ominous implications exactly because it is a critic's perspective. In G, Q's balancing act between the critic as summarizer of taste and as the prescriptor of it has shifted in favor of the latter. We can see this for instance in G's determination to open up the anthology to "satiric, political, epistolary, and didactic verse," a decision which however justifiable surely is not based on any growing popularity of those forms among the public between 1939 and 1972. It is based instead on the fact that the search of scholars for new topics to write about which do not already bear a crushing weight of commentary has resulted in those genres becoming recognized English department specializations. Since academic politics requires that no one in the department be left out, it is necessary that representatives of all these genres be included in the poetic canon, and anthologies are the primary means of communicating this judgment to the public. We may see G's edition as standing at a crossroads, or perhaps a better metaphor would be a hilltop, a critical vantage point from which a broader and more judicious survey may be made than previously, but which is also farther removed from the ordinary social world.